Abstract

The product design lifecycle is dependent on user-feedback to deploy products with the highest rate of market success. User-feedback informs a product design to cater to the needs of the consumer. Feedback can come at any stage of the design lifecycle but earlier feedback leads to more significant impact in design decisions/direction. This study seeks to make use of design representations – like sketches – to represent a real product and consequently elicit early feedback. In this study, 5 different design representations of a heater product were created and validated for the purpose of exploring their capabilities. 36 feedback-sessions were conducted to gather data on the representations and this data was coded to distill the feedback and discover the representation’s shortcomings compared to the real product. The results informed a plan to update the representations to more accurately represent the real product. The trends observed while coding shed light on common oversights made by designers in creating representations of a concept product - this will contribute to developing a system for producing design representations optimal for acquiring feedback in the design-lifecycle.